My review!

The film is not messy. There is a pattern to how each chapter unfolds, and there is a patterned rationale to why the chapters are placed in the order they are in.

One of the transitions featured a moment of breathtaking cinematography. The transition from chapter 3 into chapter 4 was mesmerizing and cinematically gorgeous. The end of chapter 3: the attempted arrest of a drug dealer spiraled into rioting which resulted in a police room meeting that erupted into a shouting match as Israeli officers struggled with how to help people who didn't want their help, and Dando sat lost in his own thoughts about his missing brother (perhaps thinking about how his soldier brother was possibly killed by Arabs, the people Dando is trying to help); the chapter winds down into the discovery of Dando's brother, a heap of bones in a cave: this distills into a constricted close-up of Dando's mother wailing and his father hardening; chapter 4 then begins: a burst of hot splashing glows of red-orange grease fire illuminating a dim steely gray interiour as scratchy sounds of carrolling are heard: Binj and Malek and Omar, three lost young men lacking the type of family structure and support Dando had, are happily and raspily singing a children's song while working up to their elbows in cooking grease. Two antipodal ambiances hitched one after the other, resulting in a strikingly therapeutic transition.

It's not better than Un Prophète, although I rated both films a 10/10. Un Prophète is not messy at all, and everything in that film flows forward in logical sequence. And the film is one of the greatest masterworks of cinema ever fashioned.

The ending of Ajamo can only be misunderstood if you could not tell the difference between the characters and/or were not attentive to the plot. I fell into the trap of both faults, and watched the film a second time with better mental preparation.

The acting is refreshingly gritty and raw and realistic (just like the acting in Un Prophète).

There's a lot to say about this film. It's a powerful ethnic and cultural mosaic (Israeli Arabs, Israeli Jews, Bedouins, ultra-Orthodox Jews, Palestinians, Muslim clerics, Palestinian vernacular dappled with comet-tails of Hebrew) of what life is like for Israeli Arabs and Jews living mixed together in the mean street ghettoes of Jaffa: a burning ramshackle rubble of sand and stone and heat and guns and drugs and blood, with rare glimpses of the famous romantic blue sea, and it's brought to you by the joint partnership of an Israeli Arab Christian and an Isareli Jew.

You can't tell the difference between Arabs and Bedouins and Jews and Muslims and Christians until the events and dialogue reveal the differences (and they could be living in the ghettos of LA or Chicago or France or Greece or Morocco or Egypt or Brazil or Cuba or Haiti or Bangladesh or Malaysia or India, etc).

The circulatory fusion of all these ethnicities and cultures muted their ethnic and cultural distinctions instead of amplifying them, a predicament intentionally machinated by the directors. This muting echoes the origin of the word "Ajami" - mute, incomprehensible, non-fluent, and ironically non-Arab; the directors crafted these characters to be ethnically and culturally indistinguishable from each other, and that makes whatever pre-existing prejudices and confirmation biases we the viewers possess suddenly incomprehensible and thereafter muted, and that challenges viewers to embrace a new language of thought that opens the door to new methods of communication.

It nullifies the propaganda that all Israeli Jews look like (and are thus) white Europeans, and nullifies the propaganda that Israeli Arabs look nothing like (and thus are not) West Bank Palestinians (nearly all Israeli Arabs are Palestinians). The treatment of Nasri and Omar's family by the Bedouin family is the same treatment the Israeli government and IDF has inflicted on Palestinians. Abu Elias' refusal to allow his daughter to be with Omar based on religious and socioeconomic reasons directly mirrors the refusal of the Israeli government and the Chief Rabbinate of Israel to sanction inter-faith marriages. This challenges many viewers to realize that Arabs/Palestinians are acting in the same manner as they accuse the Israeli government and IDF of acting, and it demonstrate Arabs are Jews are Muslims are Christians are Bedouins. They don't act any different from the other. They act the same, think the same, share the same biases and bigotry and prejudices and confirmation biases.

A Shakespearean moment is enacted for us when the stereotype of a complaining Jew is comically mixed with the stereotype of Arabs as goat-tenders and hoodlums and hookah-smokers: two different peoples, both alike in "dignity", a situation that results in a straightforward killing that could happen anywhere, and would be treated as a run-of-the-mill murder anywhere, yet in Jaffa, the moment is mutated into a collective witchhunt against "terrorizing" Palestinians. If we heard a news brief about a Palestinian who stabbed a Jew to death in Jaffa, we would think, "Palestinian terrorist". This film shows us, "no, a common quarrel about noise that spiraled out of control, resulting in a common but unfortunate spur-of-the-moment killing."

The word "Ajami" is also used to denote a centuries-old writing system that applies modified Arabic script to a phonetic rendering of their Arabic and/or Persian language, and this hybrid writing system preserved a millennium worth of African and Persian knowledge (history, literature, religion, etc), yet is largely untranslated. It was originally designed as a method to disseminate Islam across Africa, and was later used to record history and genealogy and traditional medicine and poetry. But it's a strange, alien language, and despite academic efforts to rally and herd scholars into translating tens of thousands of documented written in Ajami, not much has been translated, and never will be.

Perhaps the directors of the film Ajami are telling us to not forget that Israelis and Arabs are already fused together because of their hybrid histories and languages and cultures and religions, and that we need to be careful not to allow thousands of years of their hybridized nations to become muted into ramshackle impoverished crime-infested oblivion, not to allow them to sink into the sands of time alien to each other and unable to translate (communicate with) each other, not to forget there are thousands of years of their shared history and culture and dreams that needs to be explored and translated, and that the new postmodern hybridization of Israeli and Arabs in the fields of art (cinema, music, art, literature) and politics (joint Israeli-Palestinian human rights groups and NGOs and solidarity movements) must be embraced immediately worldwide, otherwise, we will squander this new postmodern window of opportunity that is enabling Israelis and Palestinians to build new effective, permanent hybrid coalitions with each other that transcend old divides, coalitions that are enabling Israelis and Palestinians and ourselves to become fluent with each other and understanding of each other and building futures together, that we must not allow millions upon millions upon millions of untranslated shared beliefs and shared feelings and shared hopes and shared dreams and shared goals and shared histories and shared cultures vanish into ghettos that were once exotic flourishing archaeological treasures built and maintained by Jews and Arabs alike.

If we don't allow our ethnic/cultural/religious divisions to intersect and overlap in celebratory fashion, if we don't strive to preserve the common culture that transcends ethnic/cultural/religious divisions, then we all become Ajami, lost, muted, alien, untranslated, indistinguishable, and in doing so, we undo our ethnic and cultural and religious origins.

You mentioned you're pleased to see a joint German-Israeli film and that you think it's beautiful to see how much the world has grown and set differences aside - there many are joint Israeli-German productions, they've been jointly producing films with Germany since the 1950's.

What you should be pleased about is that this film is a passionate joint Israeli Arab and Israeli Jewish collaboration: THAT is the triumph of this film, that indicates how two groups of people have grown and changed and progressed.